After more than two years of development and a successful limited availability program, legal technology company CS Disco Inc has announced the general availability of DISCO AI. ‘Deep learning AI is changing the landscape of innovation in technology. From self-driving cars and home automation, to cancer diagnosis and crime prevention, AI can help solve some of the world's biggest and most complex challenges,’ said Neil Etheridge, VP of Marketing at DISCO. ‘We wanted to use that technology to simplify and automate the tasks faced today by law firms and corporate legal departments.’

‘Reduce time, burden and cost’

While there will be many applications for DISCO AI, initially the focus is to dramatically reduce the time, burden, and cost of identifying evidence in legal document review - a process known as ediscovery. Although older, more rigid technologies and processes - sometimes referred to as TAR (Technology Assisted Review) - have been applied to ediscovery, adoption and results have been limited compared to the potential that AI can deliver.

‘Faster than ever seen in legal space’

DISCO, a native cloud technology, has the advantage of massive GPU compute-on-demand to power the latest machine learning technologies and algorithms, such as Google’s Word2Vec and a series of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to deliver higher levels of classification accuracy, faster than ever previously seen in the legal space.

‘Excited’

‘I am excited DISCO AI is bringing deep learning to ediscovery, which I anticipate will dramatically improve the speed and accuracy of document analysis and minimise traditional review,’ stated Gordon Calhoun, Partner and Chair of the Electronic Discovery, Information Management & Compliance Practice at Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard & Smith LLP. ‘Deep learning neural nets have the potential to take us beyond text data, allow us to better understand the evidentiary value of the cocoon of data that surrounds us and use the IoT as a virtual witness in the courtroom. I expect these advances will transform many other areas of the practice of law, as well.’

Predictions for suggested document classifications

Using DISCO AI, lawyers are presented with predictions for suggested document classifications (or tags) relevant to particular aspects of a case, such as key issues, importance, confidential information, and overall case relevance within the DISCO interface. Working in the background during the normal course of a review, DISCO AI displays Tag Predictions — a suggested tag with a score from -100 to +100, indicating the likelihood that the tag should be applied to the document by a human — in real-time.

‘Impressive results’

The results seen during the limited availability phase of DISCO AI are impressive. The platform’s ability to correctly predict the likelihood that a tag should or should not be applied to a document is consistently in the 85 per cent to 95 per cent range, even with as few as 50 examples and data sets as small as 2,000 documents. These results can enable companies and law firms to dramatically reduce the cost of discovery and the time taken to identify key evidence, even on small cases with quick turnarounds - an area TAR traditionally has not been successful, the company claimed.

AI and LegalTech just taking off

‘Artificial intelligence and legal technology are two areas that are just taking off,’ said Kiwi Camara, founder and CEO of DISCO. ‘We will continue to bring the latest advances in technology to bear on the problems lawyers face through products and services that deliver magical experiences for lawyers and their teams. We’re just getting started.’